


a tragedy in three acts

by bytheinco_nstantmoon



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Beauty Standards, Bisexuality, But in a bad way, Carrie Wilson Has Autism, Carrie Wilson-centric, Emotional Baggage, First Kiss, French Carrie Wilson, Growing Up, Levana Love Club, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Pining, Self-Esteem Issues, Smoking, Young Love, fuck ur mum, i said oh it's valentine's? let me post some cynical introspection, idk why either shut up, it's not stated it's just important u know, the meaning of love, this is way too short for the amount of time it took me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:20:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29441805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bytheinco_nstantmoon/pseuds/bytheinco_nstantmoon
Summary: i. Carrie is obsessed with beauty.ii. Carrie is fascinated by freedom.iii. Carrie is enraptured by everything.-or; Carrie doesn't cry at her birth, but her grandmother does. Thirteen years later, she cries herself to sleep.
Relationships: Bobby | Trevor Wilson & Carrie Wilson, Carrie Wilson & Carrie Wilson's Mother, Carrie Wilson/Original Male Character(s), Flynn/Nick/Carrie Wilson
Comments: 9
Kudos: 31





	a tragedy in three acts

**Author's Note:**

> hi i love carrie wilson. that's all goodnight

Carrie is born in a cabin, tucked away in the woods of northern France, with snow swelling the landscape all around them. She doesn’t cry, but her grandmother does; she holds the baby in her arms and shakes, crying out with a grief that has no name. Carrie’s mother watches them and says nothing as Trevor is drawn out onto the porch by his father-in-law.

“I went overseas,” the older man says, lighting a cigarette for the both of them. “Back in ‘62.” Trevor stays politely quiet as the smoke billows around them. The snow is thick. It’s cold this year. “It was for work. There were other people in my department. I could have said no. Lydia was still little back then, but she begged me to stay. Did everything she could to stop me from going. Stole my damn passport till her mother found it and took it back.” His words are clipped, and Trevor squints slightly, turning to face him. Both the language and the anger are foreign, clumsy to his ears. “She wouldn’t steal your passport,” his father-in-law says. “She doesn’t do that anymore. She just walks away. That’s love to her.” The wind rips the spark out of Trevor’s cigarette. “Teach your daughter something else.”

Inside the cabin, Carrie’s grandmother cries.

_ act i. _

Carrie is obsessed with beauty.

That which is pure, that which is good; that which is sweet and mild; that which is beautiful- think on these things. In her quiet hours, she lets her eyes open wide, finding beauty in those details. Beauty is written in the loud crash of the waves. It’s in the whip of wind against her window, in the touch of chills down her spine as she steps outside. It’s built up in tired eyes that ache for rest; it keeps itself calm in the deep shadows of sleep. In the thrill of fear during a scary film or the strike of shame when she makes a mistake. There, in moments where the veil is stripped away, where everything is pure and raw and real, there is beauty. There is the most pure kind of beauty there can be. Those are the moments Carrie lives in reverence of.

Carrie is seven years old, and she is beautiful. She knows this because her hands are soft and sweet and mild, but her voice is as loud as the waves in a thunderstorm. Her smile moves in and out like the tide, and in its absence, in her frown, there is a sharpness as stripping, as punishing, as the whip of the wind. She can hold four seasons inside her. She can hold the summer wind in her ceaseless words, the bloom of spring in her utter wonder of the world, the silence of winter in her slow, gentle heart, the turn of autumn in the catch of sunlight on her auburn hair. She is beautiful in the way she has memorised the moon on the nights her soul won’t rest. She is beautiful in the dreams that bring her dancing through to the morning. Carrie is beautiful because she is the details, because she is the reality, because she is built of a hundred smaller things instead of only herself. Carrie is beautiful because she keeps her eyes wide open.

Carrie is only seven, but she rarely cries. She thinks there’s beauty in the taste of the salt and the shake of the shoulders and the catch of her breath in her throat, ripping in and out of her lungs as if it has to fight to keep her shuddering body alive. She thinks there’s beauty in the way her face looks after, stained and marked by a tempest she’s let loose on herself. Crying is beautiful, Carrie thinks, but she doesn’t cry often. Her mother doesn’t find it so lovely.

Her mother has hair three shades lighter than hers and eyes three shades more distant, with thin hands and thin ankles and a thin neck that tilts this way and that, letting her survey the whole room with little inhibition. Somehow, by chance of the wind or the world, that neck rarely bends down to catch sight of what is closer to the floor. By virtue of that chance, Carrie lives in a house of closed eyes.

There’s something beautiful, probably, in being a mystery. She is a young, small, yet to bloom; when she does, she will bloom unseen, flowering into whoever she chooses to be. Maybe they’ll catch sight of her once she’s grown into herself.

That’s probably beautiful. Someday, Carrie hopes, once she’s grown, her eyes will be open enough to see how.

For now, though, she sneaks downstairs in late hours and sits in the backyard to look up at the sky. There aren’t many stars, but that’s alright. She can imagine the rest. She fills in the spaces in her mind, as if she’s got a white crayon to dot at the sky and she’s holding it in her little hand, reaching up and up and up, further than she’ll ever go. It’s a pretty thought.

“You shouldn’t be out here.”

Carrie goes stiff with fear, because she doesn’t recognise the voice, but it’s only her mother who sits down beside her. Her shoulders don’t relax. “It’s pretty.”

“Yeah, well-” her mother fumbles in the pocket of her robe and pulls out a pack of Marlboros. The click of the lighter makes Carrie flinch. “-you won’t be if you don’t get good sleep.”

“Huh?”

“Bags under your eyes, slouched posture, bad skin- it all comes from lack of sleep.”

Carrie frowns. “I don’t need to look perfect to be pretty,” she defends. Daddy says she’s beautiful just the way she is.

“Oh, what do you think beauty is?” her mother asks, but it’s that tone where she’s not really asking, she’s just pretending to, so Carrie stays quiet. “It’s just about the way you walk, the way you talk, the way people look at you. It’s all about them, baby. We can be as beautiful as anything, but we’re nothing without them.” Carrie isn’t quite sure who them is, but she doesn’t dare ask. Her mother takes a drag of her cigarette. “These are bad for beauty too,” she continues. Her voice is tinged with the bitterness of the smoke. “But hell, they’ll never find me pretty.” Privately, Carrie thinks that maybe it’s because she isn’t, but she doesn’t say that. “You spoiled that. Ruined the whole damn career.”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

It still feels like it is, but Carrie hates repeating herself, so she doesn’t apologise again. She just looks up at the stars and at the spaces between them and imagines she’s got her white crayon back in her hand again. “Do you think the stars are beautiful?” she asks.

“We can see hardly any of them.”

“But the ones we can see,” Carrie prods. “Are those beautiful?”

Her mother takes another drag. “We can’t see enough to tell,” she says. “Don’t ask foolish questions. It’s not becoming.”

“Becoming?”

“Beautiful.”

“Oh.” Carrie blinks. “Well, how do I know if a question is foolish before I ask it?”

Her mother sighs. Carrie thinks privately that the end of the cigarette looks a bit like a star, if she squints. “You don’t. So you might as well ask no questions at all.” There’s something wry about the side glance she offers. “You’re more beautiful when you know everything.”

“Oh.”

The smoke smells acrid, and Carrie sits there anyway, and she’s only seven years old. The stars aren’t as beautiful anymore.

She thinks maybe she isn’t beautiful. After all, this moment, sitting with her mother, is pure and raw and real, and it is bitter. It is ugly. Carrie was wrong. Maybe she’s ugly, too.

_ act ii. _

Carrie is fascinated by freedom.

The concept, the word, the feeling- it’s incomparable. To be alone in her living room, spinning in circles as she sings at the top of her lungs, or to run down the beach at six in the morning before anyone’s awake, listening to the waves sing, listening to the tides dance to a tune they’ve written a thousand times on different grains of sand, the world changing under her feet as life goes in a breathless moment; to be under the moon, undisturbed, staring up at the most beautiful thing in all the world, or under the shadow of a tree, observing passerby; to be free is, by such occasions, to be alone. Carrie is most fascinated by moments she spends alone.

She is thirteen when she has her first kiss. It goes a little like this:

She is thirteen, on the curb behind the school at lunchtime, looking at the sky. She hasn’t touched her food yet. She’s busy admiring the colors sprawled up above her; rain is coming, and the vivid blue is mottled with clouds of different saturations. Some are like coal that’s been lying undisturbed, a dark grey, thick and ready to crumble, while some are like silver necklaces, thin and light, winding around the neck of afternoon. Flynn had done her hair up in a braid during art. Carrie’s never worn her hair in a braid before, because she doesn’t know how to make them, but she thinks she might ask Flynn to do it more often.

“It’s nice out.”

His name is Peter. He sits down next to her with his elbows leaning onto his knees, looking up at the sky.

“Not really,” Carrie replies. Her eyes slant over to him. Peter is pretty, in his own way; his nose is too crooked for its size, maybe, or his hair is too dark for his complexion, but Carrie doesn’t see why flaws have to make something less lovely. He has curls and freckles and soft, nearly black eyes, and his hands are covered in scratches and scars because he likes to whittle. That’s beautiful, Carrie thinks- she wishes she could whittle. She’d like to look at something unformed and see art. It seems a very pretty way to live. It seems like freedom.

Peter’s smile is as crooked as his nose, and it crinkles up his right eye to squinting while hardly creasing his left, but the disproportion is charming. Carrie smiles back. “I think it is,” he says. “I think it’s very nice.”

“It’s going to rain,” she points out.

He looks up at the sky. “I like the rain.” The rain smells like freedom. Carrie likes the rain, too. She scoots a little closer, and their shoulders press together, and Peter’s crooked smile makes her smile back. “I didn’t come out here for the rain, though,” he continues. “I thought you’d like the company.”

Carrie is fascinated by moments alone, but she thinks she could be fascinated by Peter too, if she was given long enough to learn how. “I like  _ your  _ company.”

“I feel so special.”

“You should.”

And because they’re thirteen, because they’re silly, reckless kids that like early mornings and late nights and dancing in the rain, Peter kisses her, just like that. And Carrie’s never kissed anyone before, but for the first time, she feels free with someone else nearby, so she kisses back. The first raindrops land on their heads.

“That was lovely,” she says.

He winds his fingers into hers. “I thought so, too.”

Everybody, Carrie thinks, should have someone like Peter. Whether it’s a first kiss or a last, a friend, a brother, a conversation with a stranger, everybody should have a Peter. Carrie is fascinated by freedom, but she has never felt it like this. Her mother rarely glances towards the floor, her father lives under some phantom weight his shoulders can barely hold, and Carrie hovers between them, standing on some tightrope, wishing for rainstorms and empty halls. She isn’t afraid to stand there. Julie and Flynn are down below, and if she tumbles, she’ll land among friends, but it’s a lonely, unsteady place to stand, and sometimes she wishes she could just jump instead of waiting to fall.

Nobody has ever stepped onto the tightrope with her before, but Peter walks out with no hesitation, and his hands stay clasped in hers. It’s lonely still, but it’s lonely and safe, and his eyes, and his eyes are fixed on her. They’re only thirteen. It’s so stifling to be only thirteen. They aren’t old enough to be themselves quite yet, but they’re too old to be children; they can’t run away, but they can’t stay where they are. The world is dragging them along, and they are kicking and screaming and straining and holding hands through it all. They are being yanked from childhood into something more lonely, but they’re lonely together, and the tightrope is steadier beneath her feet.

Except-

They’re only thirteen.

In hindsight, it happens in a flash. Later, it will heal as a bullet wound, sudden and stunning and an ugly scar. When she’s thirteen, though, it’s the twist of a knife. It’s a slow burn of pain, steadily arching up and up. Her mother leaves in mid December, and Peter holds her as she tries to cry. In January, he helps her burn photos, and in February, he gives her a necklace with a locket on Valentine’s Day. In March, they watch the first sunrise of spring together on the beach. In April, he celebrates her birthday with her and twirls her around the living room. In May, she writes him a song. He cries, but he kisses her, and it still feels as much like freedom as it did on the curb at lunchtime.

In June, Carrie goes to visit her mother. It is two long, torturous months. Her father won’t buy her a phone yet, because he says she’s already famous enough, and Carrie doesn’t usually mind, because she prefers being alone anyway, but two months without a way to talk to Peter makes everything so much more unsteady. Her mother makes fun of her for it. She says, “Carolynn, baby, you know boys will only let you down. Don’t depend on them,” and Carrie doesn’t bother trying to explain the difference between needing someone and wanting them. She can live without Peter. She just doesn’t like it. Nobody else stands on the tightrope with her.

The knife twists.

In August, she arrives home, and Peter’s house is empty. “They’re on the East Coast,” Julie says.

Carrie puts the locket under her pillow and cries herself to sleep.

She is only fourteen. Not so long ago, she felt too old, because she was no longer small enough to dart beneath the hurdles. Now, in the wake of the knife, she feels much too young, a tiny thing shoved into a body that’s much too large. She’s clumsy, stumbling; most of all, though, she’s lonely. There’s no one left to split the silence with. Julie and Flynn are much too far away, holding hands somewhere down below the rope, and Carrie was never one for many friends. It’s jarring. She’s too small. She has spent fourteen years fascinated by the moments she spends alone, and all of the sudden those moments sting too much to love. Peter’s eyes were soft and almost black and unerringly fixed on her, and without him, Carrie feels less lonely and more ignored. She’s trapped in her own circle. She’s nothing to no one. She’s nothing at all.

She’s nothing at all. She’s only fourteen.

There’s a new kind of freedom in the aftermath. Childhood leaves its scar, and Carrie covers it with concealer and powder, waterproof, thick enough to make her visible under the stage lights. She wears bright colors. She wears high heels. She stops braiding her hair.

She leaves red lipstick on Nick’s cheek, and she likes the way it looks. Everyone can see the impression. Everybody can see the shade of red connecting them, a red string of fate, bright and bold and impossible to ignore. There’s a new kind of freedom in that. When everyone can see you, there’s nowhere you can’t go.

She leaves the locket under her pillow, though. She’s grown out of who she used to be, grown into covered scars and red lips and strong basslines, but that little thirteen year old on the curb at lunchtime still lives inside her. That little thirteen year old still hums the song she wrote in May.

Freedom is in the eyes of the audience. Carrie puts on lipstick and puts on a show, and then at night she cries herself to sleep.

_ act iii. _

Carrie is enraptured by everything.

Everything, she finds, is in the ocean tides; it’s in the shifting sky, in the thrum of the earthquake, in the exhilaration of free falling and the reverberation of the landing. It’s in the flare of the anger, in the swell of the grief, in the dance of the dreams through her fingertips. It’s a symphony, one that swells up and around and through, keeping her lungs full and her eyes wide open. She can’t help but stare. Carrie ignites her passion onstage, burning herself with the matches in her heart to set off a firework show, but more than fireworks, more than flames, more than the rain of applause, she loves to keep her eyes open. She wants to see everything. And the universe is billions of years old, but there are times, brief as they may be, where Carrie can see every moment in convergence. Every orbit, every tide, every burning star, all colliding and bursting into incredible, rich relief, filling her lungs with stardust.

It’s ten on a Saturday evening. It’s ten- her feet are sunk in the sand- her hair is dripping with saltwater- it’s ten on a Saturday evening, and everything flares up before her eyes, spinning in a wild circle with arms flung wide, voice arching up into the wind as Carrie stares with eyes wide open.

Everything, she thinks distantly, is in the ocean tides, is in Flynn’s hair spinning out around her like a breaking wave. Everything is in the shifting sky, and it lives vividly in the bursting joy on Flynn’s face shifting into bright contentment as her feet slow and she comes to a stop, illuminated and iridescent and enrapturing. It’s in the earthquake that swells inside Carrie’s chest at the sight, in the exhilaration of hearing Flynn’s laugh, in the reverberation of awe that echoes through all her bones. The fire flickers like anger over Flynn’s face (and isn’t everything in the anger?) and Carrie’s heart swells with something like grief for the aching space between them (and isn’t everything in the grief?). Her hands are dripping with water. She can feel for a moment the drift of Flynn’s fingers across her palm. It feels like billions of years have passed since her skin last met Flynn’s, but for that soft silence between one breath and the next, Carrie can see their fingers intertwined; Carrie can see everything.

There’s everything, and then there’s Nick.

Nick lives outside the orbits and the stardust and the flames. Nick doesn’t burn in the pit of her stomach like Flynn does. Nick is the swell of rain in spring; he is the bassline of the song that thrives inside her bones. Nick fills up the empty spaces between the stars. He’s constant and steady and vibrant. Flynn has been Carrie’s horizon since the world built them, but Nick was her choice. She’d allowed herself to watch the sun rise and flood over the horizon with a spill of gold that was equally as precious. Nick shines, and Carrie watches with her eyes wide open.

There’s everything, and Carrie is enraptured; there’s Nick, and Carrie is in love. Loving Flynn is intrinsic to who she is. It lives in her soul like Yggdrasill. It’s a hurricane inside her heart. She has no choice in loving Flynn. Flynn burns like a thousand stars are caught under her skin, and Carrie gets caught up in the dazzling night, and Carrie loves her. Nick rose into her life when she was aching for a morning. She saw him and she trusted him; she trusted him, and he warmed the frigidity in her fragile soul, and she traded the warmth for warmer love. She loves Flynn because she’s Carrie, and she loves Nick because he’s Nick, and here in the soft silence between one breath and the next, she loves both of them so goddamn much that she thinks she’ll die.

There’s everything, and then there’s love.

Here’s the thing about love: it’s selfish. Every poem, every song, every epic depicts it as giving, as gratitude. In myth, love is a gift. To love is to give, the fairytales say; Carrie Wilson is no princess, though, and the world’s narrative is one unwritten, and love is meant for selfish people. It’s a selfish thing. It’s vulnerable, and it’s gentle, and it’s gorgeous, and it’s in those that need to feel it. All those villains they call loveless- they don’t have any lack. They just have the wrong kind. They have no empathy. They have no kindness. They’re selfish, but by God are they in love. In love with themselves, in love with life, in love with the rain of applause.

It’s Flynn and Nick that save her. She’s selfish and single-minded, but she’s not entirely herself. She’s taken a part of each of them and tucked it into her soul. She’s woven them into her identity. Part of her heart beats for Nick. Part of her lungs breathe for Flynn. She’s in love. By God, is she in love.

Fairytales paint love as freedom. As victory. As the goal and the prize and the taste of satisfaction. But fairytales live in fiction, and Carrie, in love, can taste nothing but regret. Salvation is bitter. She thinks, maybe, she would rather forget how to love than keep staring at the aching space between her and Flynn. Love isn’t freedom. Love is standing on the beach at ten on a Saturday evening, watching Flynn’s face shift into bright contentment, thinking about Nick even though she hasn’t seen him all night. Love is the rush of water around her feet as the tide pulls back out, leaving her drenched and shivering on the outskirts of a party where Flynn is the epicentre. Love is feeling the part of Nick in her heart shrink down in the frost as the part of Flynn in her lungs swells with the cold wind. Love is closing her eyes in the soft silence between one breath and the next.

There is everything, and then there is love.

She breathes out. The night air catches in her dripping hair. The stardust falls away into the sea.

It’s ten in the evening on a Saturday, and for Carrie, love is walking away.

**Author's Note:**

> mm yeah. that's that. anyway drop a comment down below, let me know what you thought, or hmu on tumblr @bobbywilsonsupremacy!! always glad to hear whatever yall have to say!! love you all!! happy valentine's day <3


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